(Modern day Izmir, which sits on top of ancient Smyrna)
Our time in Turkey is running down, only two days left. Its a strange feeling, we haven't even been over here for two weeks yet, but it feels like we've been here forever. At the same time, I'm surprised and a little sad that we will be leaving Turkey so soon. There are some things that I'll miss about Turkey but most of all will probably be the beautiful landscapes. I wish that I had a lot more time to spend hiking through some of the mountains that they have here. I think that another reason I'll be sad to leave Turkey is because that will be a reminder that the end of our trip is creeping up, and I've really been enjoying myself, I don't want it to end.
Anyway, on to what we did today. Today we visited four of the seven churches that have letters written to them in the book of Revelation. We visited Smyrna, Sardis, Philidephia and Thyatira. Modern day Izmir sits right on top of Smyrna, and it is the third largest city in Turkey, with something like 3 million people, so there isn't a lot of archeology to see, most of it is buried under the modern city. There is a cool story about Polycarp, who was the Bishop of the city of Smyrna and was martyred in the theater in Smyrna. They had pulled him into the theater and the judge commanded him to renounce the atheists or die (the Christians were thought of as atheists in those days because they refused to worship the emperor or any pagan gods.) Polycarp refused, and eventually as he was pressed to renounce the atheists, he turned to the pagan crowd in the theater and renounced all the pagans as atheists. After more pressure he finally said, "For 86 years I have served Christ and he has never done me wrong, how can I blaspheme my king and my savior?" Then they tried to burn him at the stake, but he didn't burn so they stabbed him with a sword and he died.
(The temple of Artemis in Sardis. The little brick building next to it is a Byzantine church.)
The next place we visited was Sardis. We have seen so many beautiful places in Turkey, I can't really pick a place as the most beautiful, but Sardis was definitely one of my favorites. There was an old kingdom here that was called the Lydian kingdom, and they were are the first people that we know of who minted coins. There was a temple of Artemis in Smyrna and we visited that and a little Byzantine church that was next to the temple, then we drove down into the city to look at what was downtown Smyrna. Some of the stuff that archaeologists can figure out are pretty amazing, they can tell a store from a restaurant by looking at bones and materials that are buried in the ground.
After Sardis we went to Philidelphia and Thyatira, both of those ancient sites also have cities built on top of them, and there was almost nothing to see at each place. It was still cool to visit them and read each churches respective letter at each site. The book of Revelation has so much crazy stuff going on I always just figured the letters were crazy too, but it's different when you see where the cities were and you imagine Revelation making the rounds to the different churches in the Provence in Asia (which was the roman province in the southwestern part of modern day Turkey.) It makes it feel a lot more real.
Well that was it for today. Tomorrow we will see the last city of the seven churches of revelation, Pergamum. I'm not sure what else we will be doing but I'm sure it will be a busy day. Tomorrow night we will be spending the night in Assos, so I'll be posting from there.
Until tomorrow, thanks for reading.
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